Archive for the 'You can’t make this stuff up.' Category

Conservative students at Southern Illinois University were informed by police that their “free speech ball” was “freaking out” leftist students on campus, who complained about its presence on campus.

In a video obtained by Campus Reform, conservative student activists from Turning Point USA, the Leadership Institute and Young Americans for Liberty can be seen speaking to police officers. The students were welcoming other students to write messages on the beach ball to exercise their First Amendment rights.

Campus police stopped the students from doing so, informing them that the school received numerous reports from students who were “scared” by the ball. The police told them that they were not operating in a public space. “This is not considered like a public place. Right now, we’re going to have to put the ball away,” said an officer, adding that the ball was “freaking a lot of people out.”

Officials with Georgia’s Cherokee County school system have apologized after a teacher ordered two students out of her classroom because they were wearing “Make America Great Again” shirts. The teacher said they couldn’t wear the shirts “just like you cannot wear a swastika to school.”

I suppose that this really qualifies under Trump Derangement Syndrome but the headline wasn’t as self-explanatory as such incidents’ headlines usually are.

I wonder whether that inclues idiolects like SJW (‘You’re all racist!’), proglodyte (‘You’re all bigots!’), and Antifa (‘You’re all Nazis!’) — granted, the latter are somewhat limited in their vocabulary, but make up for it in volume.

Courts in other states also were examined and faulted. Along with California, they began working to comply with U.S civil rights law, which bars discrimination based on national origin. Failure to act meant the possible loss of federal money.

That’s why Calexit will never happen — it would cut off the flow of ‘federal money’, which (unlike your money) is free for the taking and inexhaustible.

At least 220 languages are spoken in California, and 44% of residents speak a language other than English at home. Seven million Californians say they cannot speak English well.

The latter includes Democrats, who just love to change the meanings of words, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.

On top of that, California’s court system is considered the largest in the nation, surpassing in size the entire labyrinth of federal courts.

Hey, gotta have jobs for all those Democrats.

In the past, non-English-speaking litigants were on their own when they went to court to fight evictions, obtain restraining orders and resolve child custody disputes

God forbid they should learn the language of the country moved to, often illegally.

Children sometimes interpreted for warring parents. One court employee recalled a woman seeking a domestic violence restraining order having to interpret for her alleged abuser.

I smell a new reality show.

Some judges said they felt uncomfortable when they received a one-word translation from an amateur interpreter even though the litigant had spoken at length in his native language.

Not a problem. Most MSNBC commentary can be summed up by ‘Trump sucks!’ without loss of meaning.

Multiple Harvard University professors have been arrested after blocking traffic to protest President Trump’s gradual rollback of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty program, which legal experts said was on constitutionally shaky ground.

Really? Really? Is anybody’s mind going to be changed by this stunt? Is there anybody in the country who is unaware of what the typical Harvard Professor’s position is on this subject? Does it accomplish anything other than irritating people inconvenienced by this crap?

Somebody needs to remind these aging hippies that the Sixties were over a while ago.

When Summer draws to an end, it is time for the Minnesota State Fair, one of the world’s great spectacles. You might expect a state fair to be a refuge from the daily onslaught of politics, but that is not the case. The parties have booths, and even in an odd-numbered year, politicians have booths. Still, this year’s event was low-key, politically, until you entered the seed section of the agriculture building.

We have written several times before about seed art, also known as crop art. Basically, the artist glues seeds of different types or colors to a board or other substrate to make a picture. One might expect this sort of folk art to be dominated by conservative ideas and values, but in fact it slants heavily to the left. This year, Trump Derangement Syndrome took over–with the judges as well as seed artists, apparently, as some of the anti-Trump designs won prizes.

The ACLU has been fading relative to the SPLC for a long time. That’s because the SPLC is an overt hate group that sees virtually everything through the Who? Whom? lens. In contrast, the old-fashioned ACLU actually sometimes supports objective principles such as free speech.

The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, has determined that the total eclipse of the sun due to occur on Monday will fail to affect enough black people.

The Atlantic’s very lengthy essay on the failure of the eclipse to occur where a sufficient number of black people reside is entitled “American Blackout.” It clocks in at a remarkable 4,544 words and does not appear to be satire.

If it were National Review, or some other right-wing publication, it would almost certainly be satire.

But The Atlantic is far from being a right-wing publication, and is not known for satirizing SJW twitches.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has canceled the company’s much anticipated meeting to talk about gender issues today. The move came after some of its employees expressed concern over online harassment they had begun to receive after their questions and names have been published outside the company on a variety of largely alt-right sites.

“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” wrote Pichai to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Welcome to our world, Sundar. You can dish it out, but you can’t take it.

In his new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, Philip Nel studies the paradox of stories that are meant to nurture but can also do harm. An English professor at Kansas State University, Nel has probed racism in kids’ books in his classes and in previous books, and he uses this volume to highlight how dozens of beloved picture and chapter books leave negative messages in children’s minds. “No one wants to admit to enjoying something or liking something that perpetuates racial stereotypes. But we do, because a book can be beautiful and racist, a book can be a classic and racist, a book can be really pleasurable and also really racist.” For instance, one of Nel’s personal favorites, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has a big problem in the Oompa Loompas. The characters, which were depicted in early editions as African pygmies, are portrayed as happy slaves, content to leave their native land behind and toil in a factory. Especially for children who are descendants of slaves, such messages can have a pernicious effect on how they interpret their value in the world.

I’m a racist, you’re a racist, he’s a racist, she’s a racist, wouldn’t you like to be a racist too?

The University of Iowa’s student newspaper has announced the discovery of a special privilege which intelligent people acquire as an accident of birth. This new privilege — called “cognitive privilege” — functions in essentially the same way as white privilege.

Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on UPDATE: Not Being Stupid Is ‘Cognitive Privilege’ Now, Which Is Just Like White Privilege

To gauge Ritchie’s chances in a hypothetical general election matchup, Delta Analytica conducted a poll from July 14-18 of 668 Michigan residents. Of respondents who stated a preference between Debbie Stabenow and Robert Ritchie, 54% stated they would vote for Ritchie while 46% said they would vote for Debbie Stabenow. These results could indicate that Ritchie is a popular figure in Michigan, Debbie Stabenow is unpopular, or some combination of concurrent trends. The relatively large, 44%, number of undecided respondents may be due to the early stages of the campaign.

They have a cost estimator. The cost of the roof for my house would exceed the price of the house, and the savings would not pay for it over the estimated life of the roof. Plus firefighters refuse to go onto roofs with solar panels because they’re unsafe.

Harlow was covering President Trump’s arrival in Paris, France to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron. After the two world leaders shook hands, they stood together as a band played the United States national anthem.

However, Harlow cut to the scene by saying, “Let’s just listen in to the French national anthem for just a moment.”

A Seattle, Wash., councilman implied that a new effort to clean excrement off the side walk outside the local courthouse could be racist Tuesday.

The crime and smell of urine and excrement have gotten so bad outside a King County courthouse that two judges are scrambling to find ways to fix the situation, reports the Seattle Times.

Seattle councilmember Larry Gossett isn’t a fan of one solution to power wash the feces sidewalks to tamp down on the smell. Power washing the sidewalks is too reminiscent of civil rights activists being hosed down, he said.

Something in the water of the Pacific that washes the Left Coast works to lower IQ.

A woman attending a Planned Parenthood protest Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill held a sign signaling to the world how much greater her virtues were than any Republican, or American, supporting the Obamacare repeal effort.

“I don’t know how to convince you to care about others,” the sign read.

Hundreds of protestors marched to express their disdain for Senate Republicans’ bill to repeal major portions of Obamacare. The most consistent complaints of the Senate bill among those in attendance were the 1-year cut to Planned Parenthood funding and the steep cuts to Medicaid.

The obvious response is ‘I don’t know how to convince you to mind your own fucking business and keep your nose out of mine (and your hand out of my pocket).’ But that doesn’t fit conveniently on a sign.

And of course anyone who supports abortion-mill Planned Parenthood has no standing from which to criticize other people about ‘not caring about others’.

By all rights, this should be the climate change/Kathy Griffin/Scott Pelley/covfefe edition. Those are just the big stories that broke in the last 48 hours. The news cycle is just as insane as the news media covering it.

Trump has ditched the Paris climate non-treaty (never approved by the Senate). Nearly talentless comedian Kathy Griffin has dropped from the D List so far that she’s nearly caught me in F+ celebrity land and even lefty CNN dropped her. (After Squatty Potty!) CBS cut anti-Trump anchor Scott Pelley from its evening news and sent him into 60 Minutes exile. And the media went nuts over another Trump tweet — obsessing over a typo.

And on a day of a huge victory for Trump by exiting the Paris Climate Accords, thrilling conservatives (even ones who opposed him), Alternet pretends Trump support is weakening. “Could Donald Trump’s Base Finally Be Turning on the President?” it asked.

Last Thursday night police were called to a noisy party in Cambridgeshire. When they arrived and heard the audio of a YouTube video on the karaoke machine mocking Osama Bin Laden, it triggered a policechick, who then pressed her panic button and called in reinforcements from headquarters. Ten more police officers and a helicopter were sent to quell the dangerous extremists who threw the party.